Pink Edition
Baekdal.com for iPhone 3G
Baekdal.com is now available for the iPhone on a special site named baekdal.mobi. The new site is optimized to give you the best browser experience using an iPhone.
Baekdal.mobi is not just a trimmed down version of Baekdal.com with the latest 25 articles (like most mobile sites). It is the full site with every section and every article in it. And you get exactly the same level of content. You can watch all the images and all the videos. You can read or post comments. You can do all the things that you can do on the main site.
There is also a number of big changes to the overall layout. It is designed for the smaller iPhone display (which is actually quite big compared to other mobile phones) and the interaction takes advantage of common iPhone interface concepts. Baekdal.mobi looks much more like something you would expect from an iPhone web application.
But the mobile site is more than just the main site in a different format. It is optimized for 3G. The images are automatically scaled to fit your screen. Instead of downloading a 40KB image, the mobile site downscale the image to about 8KB. This is important if you are using 3G and don't have a flat-rate data plan (e.g. which I don't).
The videos have also been converted to an iPhone friendly format, and embedded into the page to take full advantage of the iPhone video player.
Still, keep in mind that Baekdal.com (and also baekdal.mobi) is visual rather than textual. I rely heavily on images and videos in my articles. Baekdal.mobi will give you a smaller version than the one on the desktop, but it is still a very big site in terms of bandwidth. Keep this in mind if you are using 3G and don't have a flat-rate data plan. Watching videos, even those optimized for the iPhone, can be expensive. But luckily your iPhone also got Wi-Fi, and then it is no problem at all.
Compatibility
When I say it is just for the iPhone, I really mean that it is just for any devices with a full browser, supporting modern standards, JavaScript, webkits and video. This also includes the iPod Touch or any of the new devices running Opera Mobile 9.5 - like the HTC Touch Diamond.
It is not designed for older mobile browsers, like the one you got on a blackberry, Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile or any of the current browsers on Symbian based phones. But luckily these will soon be a thing of the past.
Visit Baekdal.mobi
Take a look at baekdal.mobi and tell me what you think.
Comments
Thomas Baekdal - Jul. 16, 2008
Thanks Jonathan :)
I am planning to write an article called "The magic behind baekdal.mobi" (or something similar) where I will discuss the challenges of creating the baekdal.mobi site.
But in short (about the videos). I "manually" converted all the videos, and reuploaded them. I then detect if you are visiting the site using an iphone, ipod touch or opera mobile device and change the video embed code to fit your device (note: opera and safari doesn't actually handle video the same way...).
All videos are actually hosted on baekdal.com.
Jens - Jul. 17, 2008
"to give you the best browser experience using an iPhone"
The best experience would be if i didn't had to remember another url, but automaticly was redirected to the iPhone version when connecting to the .com version from a mobile phone ;-)
But i looks really good. Nice job. I'm looking forward to the "The magic behind baekdal.mobi" article.
Thomas Baekdal - Jul. 17, 2008
he he - good point Jens... consider it done.
Baekdal.com will now detect if you are coming from a device capable of displaying the mobi site, and redirect you accordingly.
Thomas Baekdal - Jul. 17, 2008
BTW: A tip... if you click on an image (any image) it will load a much larger image, and enable zoom, panning etc.
jens - Jul. 17, 2008
Nice, thanks :-)
Btw, the post about the HTC phone makes the Safari browser on the iPhone crash. Don't know if it's an error in the browser or something in the code on that side?
Thomas Baekdal - Jul. 17, 2008
Jens,
I am aware that Safari crashes (occassionally) on pages with embedded video. As far as I can tell (from Googling) it is a general problem on many sites.
I am looking into it, but all the embed code is exactly the way Apple wants it to be (it was actually copy/pasted from their developement site). And, the videos should be encoded correctly too.
The problem, it seems, is limited to when the page is loading combined with touch-scrolling. It rarely crashes when pages are loaded 100%.
Thomas Baekdal - Jul. 17, 2008
BTW: The most common fix to crashing safari on the iPhone (and iPod Touch) seems to be to do a hard-reboot. This is at least the advice given by a number of websites:
e.g. from iPhone Atlas
Perform a hard reboot of your iPhone as follows: Turn the iPhone off completely, by pressing and holding the Sleep/Wake button (on top of the device) for a few seconds then slide the red slider. Turn it back on by holding the Sleep/Wake button until the Apple logo appears.
BTW: I take some comfort in that it indicates that the problem is with Apple and not baekdal.mobi. But I will continue to investigate.
Antwelm - Aug. 17, 2008
Greetings from an iPhone !
Gotta say, it sure looks good and I even think some of the best Iv seen from this keyhole angle yet...
PS: I liked Ur hummer-wraps more than the 'winner', guess that's internal politics for you..
Steve - Sep. 10, 2008
iPhone is so crash prone. Steve Jobs says he will make the apps crashless. But what about the browser. I use it everyday. They really need to fix theiphone browser crash
Published: Jul. 16, 2008
in personal notes
Thomas Baekdal is a Writer, Interaction Designer, Change Advocate and Project Manager.
Jonathan Snook - Jul. 16, 2008
well done! You've definitely put in a fair amount of work to pull this off. I'd be interested to hear more about how you did the video stuff. Did you just upload to YouTube and output different embeds based on detecting the iphone?